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Post by jonjel on Feb 10, 2011 17:24:44 GMT 1
Perhaps a subject to discuss.
Whether you be British American Chinese of from most other countries a fair proportion of your tax will go on what is termed defence. Billions upon billions going into systems and hardware which is becoming redundant very often before it leaves the drawing board or is operational.
But we are living in a world that is increasingly reliant on these wretched little machines on our desks, and they or their grandchildren control just about everything we do, whether that be power distribution, aircraft handling telephones or what we buy in the supermarket.
I know that supporters of Julian Assange decided to attack various systems with the crude but effective method of overloading their servers. And I know that a particular virus was released, aimed at the Iranian enrichment programme.
So, is it conceivable that an ‘enemy’ will never have to leave his desk in years to come, and will simply target our essential services and financial institution? State funded attacks and virus could in my view be the next type of terrorism.
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Post by Progenitor A on Feb 10, 2011 17:39:34 GMT 1
Already happening. China regularly launches 'attacks' on western systems and recently diverted about 20% of the West's internet traffic to its own servers. US Military report frequent 'hackings' on its computer systems from China US routineley , with or without approval monitors Europes computer and telephone traffic.
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Post by principled on Feb 10, 2011 20:03:43 GMT 1
Jonjel, It seems to me that future wars will be fought from desktops and won not by force of arms but by financial means (flooding the market with currency) and through the use of internet viruses. The virus in Iran just showed how far we have come. For they didn't bother attacking your average laptop but the operating system of CNC machines etc (which was probably not designed to combat Internet viruses anyway). Not wishing to be melodramatic, but with China buying up the World's resources (good prog on the TV about this at the moment), with it having trillions of dollars in overseas currencies sloshing around in its central bank and with tens of thousands of well educated programers at its disposal, is it too much of a leap to think that at anytime it wants it could now "defeat the world " game, set and match?
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Post by skeptic on Jan 14, 2012 16:07:15 GMT 1
Did you ever see the series Dark Angel? The basic idea is that thermonuclear bombs were exploded very high over America and the EMP wiped out all computers, all electronic stuff, etc, so pushing civilization back to the Dark Ages. It is doable.
There was talk recently of "what use books when the hard disk of one computer can store a whole library?" Fahrenheit 451 anyone?
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